Shaun White Snowboarding (DS)
Crappy dual-screen snowboarding
12/5/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 1
What's Hot: Um, speed boosts after landing tricks are kinda fun.
What's Not: Drab courses; Awkward touch controls; Ugly visuals and sound
Blake Snow
Status: I 'used to' a lot of things, Prudence ...
Shaun White Snowboarding for the Nintendo DS is seriously ugly, in its gameplay as well as its graphics.
This game looks like a turd.
It's obvious Ubisoft Montreal put time and effort into making the versions of
Shaun White Snowboarding for the Nintendo Wii, PlayStation Portable, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, even if they all didn't turn out as well as we'd have liked. But it seems the developer only allocated one or two programmers at most to slap together this uninspired and cheap version for the DS, which I don't have to remind you is the most popular game system in the world for three years running.
Why Ubisoft wouldn't spend more time on the game to appeal to such a large audience is anyone's guess. Maybe the line of thought was simply "Just ship something. With so many DS owners in the wild, someone's bound to buy whatever we give them."
My DS friends -- all 85 million of you -- don't buy this game. Here's why:
Mindless touch controls. The controls of the DS game are mapped entirely to the touch-screen. Not a single button works here. To speed up, you touch forward. To turn, you touch either side of the screen. To stop, you touch back. While the basic controls work fine, they quickly feel awkward and uncomfortable. While performing jumps and tricks is okay, there's never a sense of consistent control. You just scribble on the screen. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. Fail.
Touch controls add little to the game.
for DS sports some of the most arid levels I've seen. You'll skate down a mountain at moderate speed looking for a jump or rail to hit, only to find a tree on your left, followed by an identical tree on your left, followed by yet another identical tree on your left, in endless succession. The courses are lifeless and boring, and it feels like you're snowboarding down a water slide as opposed to an uneven mountain filled with obstacles.
Piss-poor presentation. Not only is it difficult to enjoy the actual snowboarding, it's horrendous trying to get there due to the confusing menu. For example, race runs require you to "choose your desired path" without explaining how to do so. After sitting like an idiot, waiting for a forward prompt to allow me to continue, I realized that I needed to draw my path, which took several tries to get right. Starting a game just shouldn't be this hard.
See no evil, hear no evil. I'm convinced the DS version of the game uses the crappiest graphics engine on the market. At some points the quality reminds me of
Pitfall!, first released in 1982. The sound effects are cheap, the music is muddy and the graphics are offensively pixilated. A real shame.
There's really nothing to like about
Shaun White Snowboarding. DS owners are much better off playing
Tony Hawk's Proving Ground to get their extreme sports fix.
This review is based on retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.
